Q&A: Why Conservatives Are More Conspiratorial
Why Conservatives Are More Conspiratorial
Question
On the one hand, you can see a lot of wisdom among American conservatives, especially in their stubborn fight against transgenderism and the excessive, extreme pro-LGBT agenda, and likewise in relation to Islam, Israel, affirmative action, and many other issues where they seem to have healthy common sense. On the other hand, I can’t help being angry about their attitude toward COVID and the climate crisis—they tend to dismiss both of them and claim that science is talking nonsense, etc. You can also see this in the attitude of American right-wing conservatives toward conspiracies—they’re really into that. How does the Rabbi explain this dissonance?
Answer
I didn’t understand what the dissonance is. The same phenomenon exists in every group, every society, and every ideology, including on the left. There are simply extremists who take things too far, into bizarre territory. That’s all. In more moderate formulations, there is some truth in almost every position. The problem begins when people see it as the whole picture and take it to an extreme.
Discussion on Answer
Right-wingers, conservatives, religious people, and all their nasty companions are indeed more prone to conspiracies and craziness,
simply because stupidity and ignorance are far more common there, by a wide margin.
In my opinion there are two reasons for this:
A. Among intelligent, thoughtful people (not academics), there is no significant difference between left and right. But among the ordinary masses there is more of a tendency toward the right, because it fits natural instinct better. The masses also tend more to adopt conspiracies.
B. Usually, the side that feels threatened tends to adopt a conspiratorial way of seeing things. Communism always felt threatened by flourishing capitalism, and therefore cultivated conspiracies about oppressive men of wealth; the Germans after World War I felt threatened by the Allies and therefore adopted the conspiracy about world Jewry; and now conservatives feel threatened by the dominant left, so they adopt various conspiracies.
In the past, actually, conspiracies were associated with the far left, which believed there was a state within a state (the deep state), and that all American policy was controlled by arms corporations.
The far right happily adopted the deep-state theory, just as it adopted class warfare (developed by Karl Marx) and critical race theories (in Israel this is associated with Avishai Ben Haim, Gadi Taub, and others).